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From: George Shapovalov <george@gentoo.org>
Organization: Gentoo Linux
To: gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org
Date: Sun, 7 Nov 2004 18:43:00 -0800
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Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] [LARGE MESSAGE] Media-sound reorganization!
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I was first going to leave the thread at that, but I am feeling a bit 
graphomanic :). In any case I just wanted to say a few words describing 
"scientific" basis for multi-tier and hierarchies in general.

On Sunday 07 November 2004 15:47, Aron Griffis wrote:
> George Shapovalov wrote: [Sun Nov 07 2004, 05:12:02PM EST]
> I don't see how multi-tier categories makes things more findable
> personally.  IMHO it just makes things more buried.  I like the
> two-tier approach we have now:

Some recent philosophical, err :), psychological studies concluded that person 
normally deals best with 7-9 objects simultaneously. Less than that and you 
have to make your "chain of command" unnecessarily deep. More than that and 
you start spending more time searching around or trying to remember what 
every one of these these is about. (Don't remember where I saw it now; my 
wife is a psychologist, that's most likely where :)).

This is essentially the reason why we use hierarchies so widely. If every 
person was able to easily memorise and deal with indefinitely large lists we 
wouldn't be organizing stuff at all, why bother if you can just come in at 
any moment and pick exactly that regularly gray box of standard size in a big 
pile on the floor :). Now, that 7-9 is an average. I believe the deal is that 
every person has some individual "most effective number" but the distribution 
peaks somewhere in that range and is not very wide..

Incidentally we have exactly 8 major top-level categories ;) :
app-, dev-, games-, mail-, net-, sys-, www-, x11-

there are also a few which are essentially unitier, where there are only 1 or 
2 second-level's for every unique 1st level, gnustep-* seem to be the largest 
of all, with 3. But then we have a total of 127 categories, which is > 
9x9=81, so we wouldn't be able to follow that rule with two-tier already 
anyway. 
BTW, I don't think we really need to follow that rule for the leaves (I mean 
packages), we can easily stick to 40-50 max for example..

With that I am going to leave this thread and only post any more if there  
going to be a technicall discussion.

Oh, just one last thing :). I am about to propose yet another split. I think 
some people already know what I imply, but in any case stay tuned :).

George



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